Updated at 9:48 a.m.

POTSDAM – A number of major St. Lawrence County websites hosted or maintained by Slic.com -- including NorthCountryNow.com -- were inaccessible early this morning.

Websites for Clarkson University, SeaComm and Community Sites, as well as Slic.com, were among those affected by the outage that began shortly before 5 a.m. and continued until about 6:30 a.m.

“One of our providers lost their downstream routes to New York City,” explained Travis Sprague, Slic.com central office technician in an e-mail message to customers.

“Unfortunately instead of going down 100 percent, they maintained a peering session with our core router, and traffic still attempted to use that inbound/outbound path.”

He continued, “We have temporarily removed that route, and all traffic should be back to normal.”

Sprague said the ssue with the downstream carriers should be resolved and Slic.com will be adding those routes back in at approximately 2 a.m. Wednesday.

"There should not be any downtime," he said, "but we would like to wait till late evening hours as a precautionary measure."